I call this book The Botany of Desire because it is as much about the human desires that connect us to these plants as it is about the plants themselves. My premise is that these human desires form a part of natural history in the same way the hummingbird’s love of red does, or the ant’s taste for the aphid’s honeydew. I think of them as the human equivalent of nectar. So while the book explores the social history of these plants, weaving them into our story, it is at the same time a natural history of the four human desires these plants evolved to stir and gratify.
